Well, you're going to have your work cut out for you, but here are a few ideas on how to manage and control user-created content at least. You may not like many of these ideas, you may not like any of them, but give 'em a think-over.

1) Do NOT make it easy to create. This may piss people off, and could very well lose you users, but it's also a fairly reliable and pretty simple way to make sure only pretty determined people do much of it.

2) Create a system of privilages for your users the way many MUCK's do. Basic users only get a small amount of storage/bandwidth or a subset of the scripting system to create new worlds. If someone has proven themselves good and worthy designers whose content is popular, then the (totalitarian-yet-generally-benevolent) admins give them broader and more powerful access.

3) Create an economy (I believe Second Life does something like this). Have some non-trivial way to earn money (stay logged-in and unidle, interact with people, interact with various RPG-ish systems like completing quests, slaying monsters, constructing items, being well-rated by other people), and make owning and operating content cost money. This has the advantage of being fairly self-regulating if done well. If someone dissapears for a year, most of their stuff dissapears, which frees up space for newer content. However, it's also potentially abusable by scripts and clans.

I'm not even going to touch the technical issues of building and maintaining such a world, except for two things.
One, do not limit yourself to a STRICTLY realistic view-point (ie a plain of infinate-seeming space). Feel free to encapsulate your environments all sorts of ways; the idea of each region being a mini-sphere world is interesting, and charming in a Little Prince sorta way (it also raises fun little questions like can you see other worlds spinning off in the distance? How do you get from one to another? Teleport? Fly? Jump? Swim?). You could have each be an island of reality in formless mist. You could have each be a flat platform in a cyber-punk computer meta-space --heh, which would be appropriate, really. It all depends on the feel you want your world to have.

Two, and this is for distributing your levels and content online: look at BitTorrent. Learn from BitTorrent. It'll make issues like "oh no, this server just dropped out" much easier to deal with, though still not trivial.

Hmmm. On reflection, I think you folks are right -- having users upload their content to the server is probably preferrable. This BitTorrent stuff is interesting, though... seems like it could work well, if the server is a seed as well as a tracker. One of the main reasons I wanted users to host their own content is to reduce the bandwidth needed for the server. Something to keep in mind if/when I get to that stage... though I think the plan would be to make a spiffy-looking single-user demo of the engine & editor, then try use that to get another programmer on board to do the networking.


Icefox,

I'm kinda leaning towards a varient of 2)... much as I'd like to set this thing up so it runs itself as much as possible. My thought at this point is that users can either have primary linking rights (granted by admins) or secondary linking rights (granted by folks with primary linking rights). Primaries can link to Crossroads, but secondaries have to link to realms put up by primaries. And with the exception of the first generation, you have to be a secondary before you can apply to be primary. So, the people the admins already trust get to screen the newbies. That said, everybody can create a (very) temporary "portal" to a realm of theirs (with a size limit, too, probably).

I disagree with 1) because I'm not convinced that "determined" correlates with "talented," and I want to make it as easy as possible for talented artists to create content that's going to enhance the game. Which is also why I (mostly) disagree with 3). If it were a question of ownership of pre-built land/objects/whatever, that'd be one thing, but I don't want to make artists jump through game-hoops for the priviledge of providing content for other users. But I don't want content to necessarily hang around indefinitely, either. I'm thinking that the rating system should affect each realm's "time" variable. If you create a really cool realm, it could stay online indefinitely -- you may even be able to earn time from it. If you make something ugly, buggy, or otherwise disliked, you'll probably find yourself re-uploading it every time you log on.

As for "feel"... well, I have a couple goals with regards to that. I want a setting that integrates the mutability of the game world, the inconsistancy of character presence, the impermanence of death, and other necessary stylizations of reality. Crossroads is not a game about a physical place or real people. Your character arrives in Crossroads out of something like Limbo... the roads don't dead-end after all, they just trail off into white blankness, and that's where you enter the world. Your character is a manifestation of a soul, arriving at a haven of existence in a sea of nothingness. The thing is, manifestation drains one's soul-energy -- at a specific rate. "Time" becomes the currency of the world, and it's taken quite literally. When you run out of time, your character dissipates back into nothingness, and you disconnect. When you're not connected, your "time" gradually recharges, so you can eventually re-manifest.

Frustrating? Yeah, potentially. But that makes it a resource that people will want. In the absence of levelling and its associated equipment upgrades, and given my desire to let people create as much content as they want (as long as they're good at it) there isn't much basis for a currency system.

But I'm getting off the subject of "feel." While I've been thinking that Crossroads proper would consist of roads-on-planes -- so they could be easily extended, allowing for a potentially unlimited number of connections to user realms -- I was hoping that most user realms would be more interesting than that. There are some limitations to what I can easily do with the engine -- I was never intending to do true curvature, just a hack that would cause users to go "over" a conveniently close horizon -- but within those limitations, I think there's a lot you could do.

A few ideas: A cliff with a bridge that leads to a tiny chunk of floating land, for a better view of the void -- or stars -- below. A freestanding door that opens into a spacious room -- which has other doors which open somewhere else entirely, though the room still seems to lack an exterior. Walking from summer through fall into winter -- and from winter to spring to summer, if you happen to turn around. A blue glass sphere on a pedestal, which, on any attempt at closer examination, teleports you "inside" it -- a glassy spherical screen with no apparent exits. Or a separate, blue-tinted realm.

*sigh* I really shouldn't be trying to talk myself into actually doing this...

I like the idea.

I have a small suggestion though that I would like to see/would have implemented in such a "game". Don't make the positioning of realms absolute. I.e. when someone disconnects, move another realm into it's place so there's never any "empty space". You could also incorporate this into your rating system such as high rated realms tend to gravitate towards each other when being moved around.